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Article by Ernan Roman Featured on CMO.com |
Jeremy Dalnes is worldwide director of digital strategy and platforms for Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices, where he is responsible for shaping global digital strategy, enhancing and extending digital platforms, and delivering digital activation programs to drive customer engagement and loyalty.
Prior to joining Johnson & Johnson/DePuy Synthes Companies, Dalnes served as vice president of e-business and mobile commerce for Zeo Inc., where he was responsible for customer acquisition, driving revenue through direct sales, and building strategic partnerships to expand Zeo’s product and service offerings. Before that, he was VP of e-business for Panasonic North America, where he was responsible for all online sales and marketing for Consumer Electronics North America.
Dalnes recently participated in our “4 Questions for Marketing Innovators” series.
1. What is one marketing topic that is most important to you as an innovator?
Deep listening, which I define as understanding customer/prospect sentiment and automatically integrating that data with your existing analytics. In practical terms, it’s understanding how a select visitor or group of visitors feels about an experience and then digging deep on how that same group behaves [Tweet this]. It involves asking very simple sentiment-based questions, like “Did this content inspire you?” “Do you believe in the solution we are offering?”—answers to which cannot be derived by standard analytics—and then using those responses to refract and understand online behavior through that lens. Some great examples of this in use by Facebook and others were recently highlighted in a New York Times article.
2. Why is this so important?
It’s always a challenge to tease out of your big data the small data that really matters. With deep listening, we use microsurvey responses as a “trail head” into the big data that we’re constantly capturing but never know quite what to do with. Only then can we truly begin to understand the unmet needs of our customers/prospects, walk in their shoes, and deliver value back to them. One example of this at J&J is DePuy Synthes Advantage, where we are leveraging this tactic to calibrate and align our messaging hierarchy on the value-added services we offer to the needs of the health-care professional and provider (i.e., hospital) audience.
3. How will the customer experience be improved by this?
We can finally create value for the end user in exchange for giving us their feedback. Imagine if you could personalize every subsequent page view of your site/app based on your knowledge that a particular person feels that price/reputation/user reviews/brand/etc. is most important to them? Alternatively, what if you knew a particular user was extremely skeptical about your product/service? How might you approach your CRM, content strategy, and information hierarchy differently? It¹s hard to understate the application of responding in real time or almost real time to customer-expressed need.
4. How will this improve the effectiveness of marketing?
The current state-of-the-art in programmatic media buying and optimization relies on conversion events that are typically transaction-oriented: Did you buy something? Download something? Install an app? The algorithms that optimize against these events eventually reach a point of diminishing return where they simply can’t buy more of that super-high-performing traunch of media without breaking the cost-per-acquisition ceiling. However, if you could ask a simple question that would help you identify a prospect that’s just about ready’ to transact but hasn’t yet, you can enhance your optimization algorithm with that survey response answer, rather than a transaction event. This allows you to widen the net of your media buy to include those prospects and increase the size of the acquisition pie, not just optimize it.
Bonus: Favorite activity outside of work?
Playing electric cello in a few projects in and around the Boston area. I am a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, so I try to stay connected to cello in one way or another. Lately it’s been watching my kids begin to explore and play a 1/4-size cello.
